The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, by Tony Kushner, with, from left: Michael Cristofer, K. Todd Freeman, Linda Emond, Stephen Spinella and Steven Pasquale, at the Public Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

For the young hustler and the older man whose furtive phone conversation begins the long-awaited new play by Tony Kushner, certain words are more effective than Viagra. I don’t have to spell them out, do I? Well, if you insist. I mean words like “gradualism,” “commodity of fetishism,” “self-alienation” and “sentimental pseudosocialism.”

“Oh yeah, baby,” the hustler growls. “Talk commie to me.”

By these standards, the 14-word title of Mr. Kushner’s latest work, which opened on Thursday night at the Public Theater, might in itself be regarded as serious foreplay. That’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures.” And theatergoers who have previously thrilled to Mr. Kushner’s heady language and his visceral commitment to ideas made flesh are sure to feel a rush of the old excitement in the opening scenes.

For in this densely textured portrait of a Brooklyn family losing its (strictly secular) religion, it’s not just Eli (Michael Esper), the hustler, and his client Pill (Stephen Spinella), a high school teacher, who derive pulse-racing pleasure from many-splendored, many-syllabled free speech. So does most of Pill’s over-thinking, argumentative, dialectic-addicted clan, starting with his dad, Gus (Michael Cristofer), a disenchanted labor leader and former Communist, who has brought his surviving family together to discuss the matter of his imminent suicide.

From the get-go it is clear that while the resulting debate may be intellectual, it won’t always be intelligible. Roughly 10 minutes into this nearly four-hour production, just after that first sexy phone exchange, “Guide” explodes into a babel of fast-talking, passionate voices — slapping and overlapping, twining and crashing into one another. And you may find yourself sitting back and grinning at this noisy spectacle of so many people having so much to say with so much passion and eloquence that you can’t follow a single one.

There will be other instances of such enjoyable eruptions throughout “Guide.” As directed by Michael Greif, it is about as well acted as any drama could be, by a cast that includes the marvelous Linda Emond. But when that first din of many voices disentangles itself into distinct strands of dialogue, a nagging impression emerges that the most important conversation that’s happening in this play isn’t among its characters; it’s between Mr. Kushner and a vast library of political theory and world drama.

Of course no play by Mr. Kushner — perhaps the most intellectually far-reaching of all major mainstream American playwrights — is going to be only a love story or a family drama. His masterwork, “Angels in America” (given a glowing revival earlier this season by Mr. Greif for the Signature Theater Company, a co-producer of “Guide”), is so remarkable precisely because it places vibrantly individual characters in a really, really big context, one that’s historical, political, even cosmic. And yet it holds onto those characters’ autonomous individuality.

I never felt that the anguished souls of “Angels” — even politically loaded figures adapted from real life, like Roy Cohn and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg — were only pawns of history, on the one hand, or of authorial manipulation, on the other. They had all the contradictions and untidiness that come with free will. The characters of “Guide” are untidy, for sure, but they don’t always feel spontaneous. There’s a sense of Mr. Kushner’s pushing them into position for their moments of one-on-one confrontation.

Though “Guide” is more naturalistic than “Angels,” which visited heaven and Antarctica, it shares the same central concern: How do we live when the old systems of belief and morality that gave form to our existence have fallen apart or proved empty? For “Guide,” Mr. Kushner narrows his focus from the universe to the living room of a Brooklyn brownstone (realized with consummate detail by Mark Wendland) that has been in the Marcantonio family for generations.

It is here that Gus, a longtime widower, has gathered his children — Pill, Empty (Ms. Emond) and V (Steven Pasquale) — and his sister, Clio (Brenda Wehle), a onetime nun and Maoist (among other things), to announce his intention of killing himself. He says it’s because he has Alzheimer’s, but his truer motivation may be a loss of faith.

Photo

Stephen Spinella, left, and Michael Esper in Tony Kushner's “Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A former longshoreman and union activist who helped to achieve (not without compromise) a guaranteed-annual-income labor contract, he feels that he now lives in a post-Marxian world that has given up and given in.

“What you call progress, I call the prison rebuilding itself,” he tells Empty, a labor lawyer.

As the children debate whether to call the police and institutionalize the old man, or let him die as he chooses, “Guide” assesses the damages of growing up with this kind of idealism or, in the case of V (Vito, who is much younger than his siblings), without it but aware of it. Paul (K. Todd Freeman), Pill’s longtime partner, tells Gus, “You’ve spent your life in fealty to a veritable machine for the manufacturing of paranoically implosive personalities.”

Of course Paul, a theologian, is ticked off at Pill (short for Pier Luigi) because he’s been having an intense relationship with Eli, the hustler, paid for with $30,000 Pill borrowed from Empty. (Her unfortunate nickname comes from the M. T. of Maria Teresa.) That money was supposed to be a nest egg for the baby Empty is having with her partner, Maeve (Danielle Skraastad), who happens to be a theologian too. (“An apophatic theologian with pronounced kataphatic inclinations,” if you must know.)

The sperm donor, by the way, is V, a contractor, who is married to Sooze (Hettienne Park). Further crowding this family portrait is the presence of Adam (Matt Servitto), Empty’s ex-husband, who lives in the garden apartment of the house, and in the final act, Shelle (Molly Price), the widow of one of Gus’s old colleagues.

This all makes it sound as if “Guide” should be titled “August: King’s County” (in reference to Tracy Letts’s popular family potboiler, “August: Osage County”). But this play’s theatrical references skew more toward Arthur Miller (whose “View From the Bridge” portrays a Brooklyn longshoreman who destroys his family) and Anton Chekhov (whose “Cherry Orchard” is invoked by name to substantiate a jerry-built plot turn).

And then of course there is George Bernard Shaw, who inspired Mr. Kushner’s title. (Shaw wrote an essay called “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism”; the “Key to the Scriptures” is from Mary Baker Eddy, who is also discussed before evening’s end.)

Shaw’s name comes up in the first scene, when Pill describes seeing “Major Barbara” (another play about a father’s dubious legacy). Pill speaks of the pleasures of Shaw’s “spinning his contradictions” as “a head rush,” like “poppers or speed or E.”

Listening to the excellent actors in “Guide” go at one another can produce the same effect. Several of the cast members have been with this production since it was staged in 2009 in Minneapolis at the Guthrie Theater (also a producer here), and it is evident in their hard-won ease with difficult material. Ms. Emond, Mr. Spinella, Mr. Esper and Mr. Cristofer mine their roles for every ounce of conflicted feeling.

Yet while “Guide” takes pains to point out how each of its characters has adapted or corrupted or abandoned the principles embodied by Gus, few of these revelations feel surprising or particularly necessary. “Angels in America” established that Mr. Kushner is a great playwright. In “Guide” he registers mainly as a great conversationalist who keeps talking well after he has made his essential points.

THE INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL’S GUIDE TO CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH A KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES